"Though 'flat design' is a popular meme right now, there is something much, much deeper going on here at Microsoft. With my own lifelong passion for design I immersed myself in the community and got a front-row seat on a journey that has its roots as far back as the late '90s with Encarta's bold use of typography and clean interface. But it truly sprang to life in late 2010 with the launch of Windows Phone and in the last few weeks has advanced even further with Windows 8.1 and Xbox One. I started from the very place I bet you are right now - disbelief that Microsoft is leading the way on design." They really are. If Apple really goes all minimalist and digital (I dislike the term 'flat') with iOS, Microsoft will have taken over the baton. Crazy world indeed.

As for AHK, it's clear that there is no Linux solution that does what AHK does, even if it were possible to do it. And it (along with its cousin, AutoIt) does a hell of a lot more than hotkeys. It's one of those little utils that keep me on Windows

Insofar as Linux goes, I like the OS, but the apps just aren't there, and most of the best ones are available for Windows anyway, or have superior commercial counterparts. OSX is the same way - people always talk about how superior it is, but on forums for many of my favorite Windows apps, there's always people begging for a Mac version

Ahh. That makes sense. I still have to put together something to snoop on the MIDI SysEx messages Yamaha MusicSoft Downloader uses so I can write a portable, open-source equivalent.

(Or at least something more polished. MusicSoft Downloader is an inefficient eyesore.)

As for AHK, it's clear that there is no Linux solution that does what AHK does, even if it were possible to do it. And it (along with its cousin, AutoIt) does a hell of a lot more than hotkeys. It's one of those little utils that keep me on Windows

Now you've got me curious. Mind giving a quick but comprehensive overview of its features? (from a user's perspective rather than Wikipedia's)

If I ever take my plans out of mothballs (placeholder name: *binder ), maybe I'll try to match it.

My favorite thing is being able to configure different hotkeys and hotstrings on a per-application basis. For example, with any app that has tabs, I use AHK to map the same keystrokes for manipulating tabs (opening/closing/switching between), so I don't have to remember different keystrokes in different apps. It's kind of the same thing as making 'dir' and 'ls' do the same thing on both Windows and Linux And the hotkeys usually work even when apps don't have focus, so just about any app supports global hotkeys by default. Among the other things it does is to automate GUI tasks (kind of like having Office macro-like capabilities across the entire OS), although I prefer using AutoIt for that.

When doing hotstrings, there's all kinds of different switches, so for example, sometimes the event happens as soon as you type a word, or you can make it happen when you press the spacebar. I like that kind of flexibility.

As for writing a replacement, AHK has been in development for years, so that ain't gonna be a small task. I think somebody might've started a Linux port, but to truly be useful, it would have to work in all kinds of apps (QT, KDE, etc) and across a variety of desktop environments.